


The Babel Languages

by dystopic (tasteofshapes)



Category: Bleach
Genre: Angst, F/M, No happy endings, Post-Soul Society Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 17:04:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7447057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tasteofshapes/pseuds/dystopic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matsumoto had merely thought it a pretty fanciful legend, but history always repeats itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Babel Languages

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt was babel. July 2006.

** Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.  
-Genesis 11:1 **

 

There is a Hebrew legend that all the different languages of the world originated from the construction of the Tower of Babel. The people had united in an attempt to build a tower that would reach to the heavens. But because man wanted to be like God, God stopped the project by making all the builders speak different languages, thus making them unable to communicate with each other and continue with the construction. The Tower was never completed, and the builders were scattered to different ends of the earth. And that was how the different languages sprang up.

Gin had told her the story once, during one of his rare visits to her room in the middle of the night, as he lay on the mattress next to her, his smile made soft and coaxing in the moonlight that spilled through the open window. Back then she hadn't learned to question him yet, and didn't ask where he had heard the legend. Gin was curious in one aspect in that he had never read a proper book in his entire life, but somehow was always picking up some odd bits of trivia or information here and there.

She had thought it had just been a pretty fanciful legend then, nothing more, and had merely smiled when he had finished and looked at her with his pale grey eyes.

"Good bedtime story," she said, never realizing what it had meant then. She yawned and snuggled back into his arms, her eyes already falling shut from exhaustion.

She didn't see the way Gin had quirked an eyebrow at her, intrigued. "Ya think so?"

"Mmmhm."

He had stroked her cheek, tender and at yet the same time not, chuckling slightly and still smiling. "Poor Rangiku, you don't really understand it, do ya?" Even back then, he spoke oddly; the permanent irony that he surrounded himself with constantly twisting his tone to contain a hint of his own private amusement.

She had sleepily turned to look at him then, and for the first time had noticed how in the shadowy darkness his smile represented more of that of a leer. "It's late, Gin," she had said instead. "Can we talk about it tomorrow?"

"Yea'." He smoothed her hair down and kissed her temple, whispering another version of the same legend into her ear, and she had fallen asleep to the sound of Gin's smooth voice telling her the Sumerian mythological version of the Tower of Babel. It was to be their last time together.

Now in retrospect she understood that he had been trying to give her a message. It had been subtle as usual, typical Gin, and she hadn't caught on till it was too late and she had captured his wrist in a vice grip, her sword held to his throat, her entire world narrowed down to the ache in her chest and the soft chuckles that Gin made.

"Shut up," she had hissed, gripping his wrist harder then necessary, and he had just shot her an amused look over his shoulder.

"Sorry, Babel," he said quietly in response, holding her gaze, and she would remember this moment as the only time he was ever honest before it was all shot to pieces. Then Captains were all shouting in alarm, and she didn't have time to wonder why before there was an awful cracking sound, and she was just aware enough to spring back as the bright light came shooting down, and then he was smiling sadly at her before disappearing into that gaping wide hole in the sky.

Later, when the worst of the damage had been brought somewhat under control, for the first time in her life Matsumoto went to the library in Soul Society and picked out the largest, heaviest book on myths and looked up the proper Babel legend. It had been exactly as Gin had told her, but unlike then she finally understood its significance.

It was what he had been trying to tell her all along. Gin spoke a different language from her now, a corrupted dialect that reeked of the stench of the quest for power no matter how terrible the consequences, peppered with tainted phrases like treachery and conspiracy. He embraced words like domination, supremacy, control, twisted them to fit his own black language until he was satisfied. In his vocabulary there was no room for foreign words like morals, justice, integrity. He left out the use of expressions like trust, love, Rangiku.

In turn, Matsumoto spoke of a never-ending language of pain, confusion, loss. She would never understand what had made him adopt a different language, what dark convictions had turned him from the person who had always protected her to the one who tried to massacre her and her friends.

And these two languages would never merge.

**  
**"Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. […]  
That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."  
-Genesis 11:7-9 


End file.
